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 School of Geography and the Environment

Doctoral Student: Mandar Trivedi

Mandar Trivedi

Position:

Completed DPhil Student: completed DPhil September 2007

Contact:

e: mandar.trivedi@gmail.com

Title:

Conservation in a changing climate: the potential to exploit microclimate heterogeneity and management


How will climate change affect species living in the extreme environments found on the tops of mountains? Will a warmer climate mean the end of some of Britain's rare mountain plants? Or will the varied landscape of the mountains create cold refuges where plants will survive even though the overall climate warms up? My PhD aims to answer these questions using a combination of field surveys and computer modelling.

The project is funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and is jointly supervised by researchers at the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology at Lancaster (CEH) and the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford.

We are studying the distribution of plants on some of the highest mountains in the central Scottish Highlands. The Ben Lawers National Nature Reserve is well-known for its rich variety of plants and has a history of botanical research. It is owned by the National Trust for Scotland and managed in partnership with Scottish Natural Heritage.

We have been monitoring the weather at the site using Automatic Weather Stations and temperature loggers. These data are being used in combination with long-term weather records from nearby Met Office stations to build a picture of the climate over the mountains. Temperatures decrease and rainfall increases with elevation. Also, dark and sunny sides of the mountains can have quite different climates.

Field surveys of montane plants allow us to find relationships between plant distribution and local climate. We will use climate change predictions to investigate potential changes in the distribution of plants over the mountains in the future.

Publications

  • Trivedi, M.R., Morecroft, M.D., Berry, P.M. & Dawson, T.P. 2008. Potential effects of climate change on plant communities in montane nature reserves in Scotland, UK. Biological Conservation 141: 1665–1675.
  • Salkeld, D.J., Trivedi, M. & Schwarzkopf, L. 2008. Parasite loads are higher in the tropics: temperate to tropical variation in a single host-parasite system. Ecography 31: 538-544.
  • Trivedi, M.R., Berry, P.M., Morecroft, M.D. & Dawson, T.P. 2008. Spatial scale affects bioclimate model projections of climate change impacts on mountain plants. Global Change Biology 14: 1089-1103.
  • Trivedi, M.R., Browne, M.K., Berry, P.M. Dawson, T.P. & Morecroft, M.D. 2007. Projecting climate change impacts on mountain snow cover in central Scotland from historical patterns. Arctic, Antarctic and Alpine Research, 39 (3): 488-499.